07/08/2026
🏥From Reactive to Predictive: Redesigning Population Health Before the Crisis Hits
At SAS Innovate on Tour Singapore earlier this week, our HLS panel brought together leaders from across Singapore's healthcare ecosystem: clinical, academic, and public sector, to unpack one of the toughest questions in healthcare today: how do we move AI from proof-of-concept to everyday clinical practice?
Moderated by Dr. Mark Lambrecht, Global Head, Healthcare & Life Sciences Advisory at SAS, the panel featured guest speakers:
🔹 Dr. Kevin Kok, Head of Digital Services, National Healthcare Group
🔹 Jason Hu, Head of Clinical Services Development, Singapore General Hospital (SGH)
🔹 Dr. Ling Zheng Jye, Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO), National University Hospital (NUH)
🔹 Pavitra Krishnaswamy, Principal Scientist and Group Lead, Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing, A*STAR
Some highlights that stayed with us:
✔️ Singapore became a super-aged society this year, with 21% of residents now above 65, and Healthier SG has already enrolled 1.4 million people into preventive care. There is now an urgent need to move from reactive response to prevention.
✔️ Dr. Ling’s message was clear: The tech and the data are already there. What we're short on is trust, and that's on technologists to earn, not assume.
✔️ Dr. Kevin broke it down into people, product, and process. Healthcare has long been structured around reactive care, with teams and systems built in silos. Moving to prevention means redesigning job scopes, tearing down data barriers, and, most critically, rethinking incentives rather than measuring admission-to-discharge turnaround. The real question is how today's intervention reduces someone's risk of diabetes ten years from now.
✔️ Pavitra offered a sharp research lens: even with a well-established tool like a risk model, the real gap isn't technical; it's alignment. What does "probability" mean to a clinician versus a data scientist? Closing that gap requires very tight cross-disciplinary calibration, plus infrastructure that connects everyday lifestyle and environmental data to clinical systems, not just episodic hospital data.
✔️ Jason kept his answer to one word: integration. NHG Health and NUHS are already on Epic, SingHealth moves over next year, and once that's done Singapore's public healthcare system will have something close to a unified national health data view. That's a big deal for cross-cluster insight into what's driving population health outcomes.
✔️ A reminder that this challenge isn't unique to Singapore. As Dr. Mark summed up, we have the data, the technology, and increasingly capable algorithms. The work now is to build the evidence, train clinicians, and scale collaboration across the region.
Thank you to our panelists for such a candid, insightful discussion, and to everyone who joined us at SAS Innovate on Tour Singapore
